David Ramirez and Dylan LeBlanc co-headline the Rumba Cafe on Friday, January 31. Doors open at 7pm, show starts at 8pm. Tickets are $25.
With a recording career spanning 16 years and 6 full lengths, David Ramirez considers his job to be a touring musician. That’s why he’s currently embarked on a co-headlining tour with Dylan LeBlanc despite the fact that his seventh album, All the Not So Gentle Reminders, won’t be out until March 21 on Blue Corn Music. He’s built a following of fan that don’t necessarily care if there’s something new, they’ll applaud those songs just as loudly as the ones they know, because they value Ramirez as a performer, a storyteller, a friend.
Up through 2015’s Fables, Ramirez fit squarely into the Americana genre with hints of country and folk peppering the singer-songwriter songs that fit alongside artists like Jason Isbell, Ryan Adams, Alex Dezen. Hints of what would come could be heard of 2017’s We’re Not Going Anywhere but it was 2020’s My Love is a Hurricane where Ramirez spread his wings. In my review of that album for Big Takeover magazine issue #87, I said Ramirez’s “new direction adds soulful, sultry, sexiness to his repertoire and most of the tracks sound like the soundtrack to pivotal network TV drama scenes.” The upcoming All the Not So Gentle Reminders further expands the sound, with the 80s-synths-meets-The-War-on-Drugs “Waiting on the Dust to Settle,” the made-for-a-Broadway-musical “Music Man,” and the bouncy “I Got People.” Ramirez told me during the course of this conversation that All the Not So Gentle Reminders will be a double vinyl release and it’s the material on side C and D (the back half of the record) that I’ve gravitated to through my listens of an advance copy of the album. You’ll just have to take my word (at least until March 21) that the “A Bigger World,” “Holiday (Crush),” “Nobody Meant to Slow You Down” three-song run is close to perfection.
Here’s a portion of the conversation David and I recently had. A more in-depth version will be posted on BigTakeover.com the week of the album release.
Your music sounds like the stuff I hear on a TV show or in a movie that makes me grab my phone and hit the Shazam app so I can figure out who the artist is. Has your music ever appeared in a TV show or a movie?
Yeah. The first one was long time ago on the spin-off of Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice. I think that was my very first one which was exciting. Most recently, it was in Fargo, one of the latest seasons with Jon Hamm. I believe they played “My Love is a Hurricane.” And a few years ago, I had a song in Billions called “I’m Not Going Anywhere.” It’s happened a few times, not very much, but it’s pretty cool when it does.
When you find out you’ll have a song in a show, do you watch it?
Yes, but it depends on what I’m subscribed to at the moment. I think for Billions I had to go a friend’s house who had Showtime in order to watch it.
You’re just kicking off a winter tour, which will bring you to Rumba Cafe on Friday night, but the album isn’t out yet. Is this something you’ve done in the past, go out and play shows before an album hit stores or streaming services?
Oh, yeah. It’s just tours, business as usual, basically. I just tour, that’s my job. When the album does come out on March 21st, we’ll hit the road again and do like a release tour. But the one that starts tomorrow here in Nashville, and the one that will lead us up to Columbus is just a normal winter tour. I do have a couple of singles out so that’s been really fun to have the freedom to play some new songs on this run. After it comes out in March, then we’ll do another tour but it’s just beginning of the year, hitting the road type thing.
Will you be introducing new material into the setlist or will you wait until you do a formal tour for the new record?
Two singles from the new record have been released so those will definitely be in the set. I don’t generally like to do the same setlist every night, there’s so much about the road that’s already monotonous and if we can switch that up on the moments we’re on stage, I find that it helps with my sanity. We’ll sprinkle some stuff that hasn’t been released into the set. For me, it’s important to see what the response is and also to learn how to play these songs because performing them in the studio is oftentimes 180 degrees different than doing them live. So, it’s worth it if for no other reason than trying to work out the kinks so when we do our release tour things are a little bit more dialed in.
Are you much of a talker between songs?
I like to chat in between tunes. I don’t rehearse what I’m going to say. Depending on the room, it could be a lot of talking and if I’m reading the room in a different way, then I might not chat all that much. My music is, for lack of a better word, pretty thoughtful and I find that if I play 90 minutes without breaking it up, it can tend to get a little heavy, so I like to bring some levity to the evening by shooting the shit and chatting about songs or life or whatever happened that day.
The reason I ask is that because when I was a kid, I saw Ace Frehley play a show in Cleveland. And at that show, he said something like, “We’ve never played this song live before.” I felt special. This was before the internet where you can read reviews of shows as they were happening. Months later I picked up some UK metal magazine and it had a review of an Ace Frehley show and in the review it mentioned that Ace introduced a song by saying he had never played it before. It was the same song that he had said that about at the show I was at!
That’s funny. It doesn’t sit well with me to blatantly make things up like that. That’s a really great story though. I live in Austin, Texas and I was at this festival this past summer. I forgot the band who was playing, I was just there to kick it. This band was from Australia. They said from the microphone, “This is our first time to play Austin, Texas,” and as they were saying that, this guy was walking past me, just some random stranger, and he looked me in the eye and said, “That’s a fucking lie. I saw them in Austin two years ago.” I think the response the band gets out of the crowd makes them stoked to make things up and see what kind of rise they can get.
For this tour, are you playing with the musicians who made the record with you?
I have to have some kind of rapport with not just the people I’m playing music with but traveling with. In an ideal world, I would be able to have the money to be able to afford to bring everyone who played in the studio with me out on the road. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. But our drummer on this trip, Jeffrey Olson, he played on the record. And then our friend, Sam Pankey, he’s subbing in. He didn’t play on the record, but he’s been out here on the road for the last couple of tours. This tour is a co-headline run with Dylan LeBlanc and he brought his guitar player, Clay Houle. We’re sharing band members on this run, which has been really fun and exciting, so I’m stoked.
